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What are the odds that God would first create a universe governed by natural laws, and then demand belief in a religion whose miracles violated those very laws?

I wrote a post yesterday saying we should not pretend to believe what we do not know. For example, if asked about whether the virgin birth or the resurrection actually happened in history, we would be more honest to say we do not know. In the conversation that followed, I was asked if I believed in the battle of Gettysburg. The questioner asked why believe witnesses in the case of Gettysburg, but not witnesses for the resurrection? It is a valid question and worth, I think, a morning meditation on the topic.

There are, let’s guess, one hundred thousand eye witnesses for the Battle of Gettysburg. There were tangible bullets and bodies as well as photographs. But what’s the actual historical proof for the resurrection? And let us resolve from the outset that we will use a method of verification we would accept for the supernatural claims of other religions. If we use a different standard for our own truth claims than for others, there is no point in even pretending to have this conversation. If we do not accept the scripture of other religions as historical and scientific proof of their claims, neither should we use that standard for our own.

The truth is, we have only four witnesses to the life of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All four were disciples of the faith in question. Each one claims there were other witnesses, but we are taking their word for it. So in truth we have only four witnesses to everything that happened.

The earliest texts of Mark do not mention either the virgin birth or the resurrection appearances. John mentions Resurrection appearances but not the virgin birth. So we actually have two witnesses to the virgin birth and three to the resurrection appearances.

Luke admits at the beginning of his gospel that he was not there and is basing his story on the hearsay evidence of those who were (Luke 1:1-4). John’s Gospel ends with evidence that his  story is been redacted by later authors. (John 21:24). Matthew and Luke both quote from Mark and also from a manuscript now lost (the Q Source). This borrowing from other sources raises the question why eye witnesses would need to copy notes from someone else.

I do not point out these facts to be unpleasant or disrespectful. I believe we can be faithful people, and also honest ones. The historical proof for the resurrection of Jesus Christ would not be accepted in a court of law, and the church should stop pretending otherwise. Few of us would accept the witness of the followers of a cult leader for supernatural acts by that founder. We should hold ourselves to the same standards we use for others.

So why do I call myself a Christian and affirm the resurrection? Because I believe it not as an historical fact itself, but as the symbol of a fact about life itself. In my opinion, the question to ask of a religious symbol like the resurrection is not whether it happened, but what does the symbol reveal about our lives. We know that early Christians were willing to die for an experience they had had. Whether that experience was an external historical fact or one of personal and communal enlightenment we cannot know. We only know they made that experience the center of their lives.

So, for me, the “proof” of any symbol is in the experiences and intuitions it symbolizes. The meaning of the resurrection (again, for me) comes in the realization that love is stronger than hate, that gentleness is stronger than violence and that life is stronger than death. But it is idolatry to try to cast the intuition in stone, or to localize and concretize it in history. As CS Lewis said of revelation in general, “It’s not a light we can see, it is the light by which we see.”

It isn’t a proper expression of faith to pretend to know what we do not. Burning bushes and empty tombs are not the stuff of faith, but are illustrations of what the word looks like to the eyes of faith. If asked if these events actually happened, one must honestly say “I do not know, I was not there.”

To teach religious parables to children as facts of science or of history is to throw the philosophical equivalent of sawdust in their eyes. It is a wound to the soul to believe faith means pretending to believe what no one knows. How can one pursue truth by first renouncing honesty?

“Reagan’s story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control—a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.”

-Bill Moyers

Sent from my iPhone

Justin Bieber has a history of brushes with the law, but then, immigrants from Canada are treated very differently before the law than those from Mexico and places further south. In 2011, 14,331 immigrants were deported for the kind of traffic violation that Justin Bieber committed recently.

At times immigration law appears almost arbitrary. Last year it was reported by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice reported:

Whatever happens to Justin Bieber will not change the reality that immigrants from the North are treated very differently than those coming from the South. It is estimated that last year 151,835 immigrants without criminal convictions were deported. The overwhelming majority of those deportees were from countries to the South. It is hard not to believe race plays a major role in this problem, but any way we look at it, immigration law seems broken.

(The report from CJCJ and Alternet link included below)

http://www.alternet.org/immigration/immigrants-get-deported-far-less-justin-bieber-did

As has been well noted, our culture figured out how to get to the moon before we thought of putting wheels on our luggage. We tend to live life from the outside in, which can make our own depths and needs inscrutable. Most of us in this culture know more about our cars and computers than the inner workings of our own hearts. So while we master our outer world, we are mastered by inner forces we have dismissed to the realm of religion and superstition. While we objectively seek peace, the god Mars (or rather the irrational intuitions he symbolized) rises within us and suddenly we are at war against our best efforts. We seek social stability, but Dionysus sings to us through our mammalian glands and we chase pleasure to the point of putting our very planet in peril. We may bury the gods, but they were only names for energies that exist primordially within and between us. The realm of religion is an effort to put names to the most important energies of our lives as we experience them subjectively. We must be very careful as we objectify our knowledge of the external world, to remember the one inside us counts too. Truth, goodness and beauty do not exist as realities in the objective world. They are the result of sentience. They emerge through our human flesh. They exist only in the world we share together subjectively. We can master the whole world and still be mastered by the energies we have discounted as superstition.

Don’t be surprised when you first begin to stand for universal human rights to be accused of being the intolerant one. Every partisan will feel you have violated their rights if you question their unfair advantages. And they may be unexpectedly vicious because their exclusivity prevents them from holding themselves and their own group to any common standard for fairness or honesty. Still, in spite of any hostile response, an invitation to join the human family is one of the greatest gifts you can offer anyone.

It isn’t easy to take rights a way from people and convince them at the same time you are protecting them. See what you think about former Governor Mike Huckabee’s latest attempt:

“If the Democrats want to insult women by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”

So reproductive health care is all about women’s lack of self control? Maybe someone explain to the Very Reverend Huckabee that women don’t make all those babies by themselves, and that controlling one’s reproductive life can be the very height of self responsibility.